The Pole and Other Stories

by J.M. Coetzee

These six stories by Nobel Prize-winner J. M. Coetzee show us, once more, a writer confronting moral and emotional quandaries, often with wry humour. In the lead story, ‘The Pole’, concert pianist Witold attempts to play out a romantic fantasy with local music devotee Beatriz. In person and in their correspondence, he is persistent, she resistant, but curious. It doesn’t end quite as she might have imagined.


The redoubtable character of Elizabeth Costello appears in four stories, engaging in philosophical discussions about death, motherhood and ethics with her adult children, in particular her son John.


The Pole and Other Stories will make you think differently about life, death and animals.


J. M. Coetzee was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. His work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg, Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. His most recent writing is a trilogy of The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus and The Death of Jesus. He lives in Adelaide.


‘To be hilarious about Heidegger is quite an achievement, but J.M. Coetzee pulls it off in one of these stories. Others, written in his beautifully limpid prose, raise profound questions about love, romantic and unromantic, growing old, and how we relate to animals. A marvellous collection that will delight and surprise you.’ Peter Singer


‘One of the finest authors writing in the English language today.’ Times

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Novels, South Africa, Contemporary, Australia, Literature

Kindle Edition

First published July 4, 2023

About the author

J. M. Coetzee is a South African writer, essayist, and translator, widely regarded as one of the most influential authors of contemporary literature. His works, often characterized by their austere prose and profound moral and philosophical depth, explore themes of colonialism, identity, power, and human suffering. Born and raised in South Africa, he later became an Australian citizen and has lived in Adelaide since 2002.
Coetzee’s breakthrough novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), established him as a major literary voice, while Life & Times of Michael K (1983) won him the first of his two Booker Prizes. His best-known work, Disgrace (1999), a stark and unsettling examination of post-apartheid South Africa, secured his second Booker Prize, making him the first author to win the award twice. His other notable novels include Foe, Age of Iron, The Master of Petersburg, Elizabeth Costello, and The Childhood of Jesus, many of which incorporate allegorical and metafictional elements.
Beyond fiction, Coetzee has written numerous essays and literary critiques, contributing significantly to discussions on literature, ethics, and history. His autobiographical trilogy—Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime—blends memoir with fiction, offering a fragmented yet insightful reflection on his own life. His literary achievements were recognized with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.
A deeply private individual, Coetzee avoids public life and rarely gives interviews, preferring to let his work speak for itself.

Reviews

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aging male fantasy can be a problem with some older writers. You worry about it when the protagonist is a similar age to the author. When the ‘vigourous‘ man in his seventies hits it off with the attractive woman of fifty. J M Coetzee is 83, his setting is a few years ago.

First impressions: a black cover with gold music staves printed vertically and randomly to hold the title and subtitle on the front and even the publisher’s name and bar code on the back. The author’s name is printed in large white front across the centre of the cover. Is this about the author or the story?

The Pole is a collection of six short stories, or more accurately a novella of 150 pages and five very short stories that take up the next hundred. Coetzee, South African turned Australian, has a huge trophy cupboard: two Bookers and a Nobel prize are the crowing glories.

The title story, The Pole, has the reader intrigued from the very first line; ‘The woman is the first to give him trouble, followed soon afterwards by the man.’ Who is narrating this? The reader is quickly engrossed in the story of Biatriz, the philanthropic wife of a wealthy banker, and Witold, a Pole and international pianist who has come to Barcelona to play a concert of Chopin. The author’s voice is there for a moment on the second page; ‘All year they have been knocking at the door, wanting to be let in or else dismissed and laid to rest. Now, at last, has their time come?’ And then he is gone.
The story of two people thrown together by remote coincidence is beautifully constructed. There are wonderful lines like ‘All their conversations seem to be like that; coins passed back and forth in the dark, in ignorance of what they are worth.’ Biatriz has to take Witold to dinner after the concert. Their only common language is English. While not at first revealing it, he is smitten by this younger woman. She is less than interested in him.

Of course the man has no idea what is going on inside her. To him she is part of the burden he has to bear for the sake of his career as a performer: one of those nagging wealthy women who will not leave him in peace until they have extorted their gram of flesh. At this very moment, in his correct but slow English, he is relating a story of the kind he presumes the women like her want to hear, a story about his first piano teacher, who sat over him with a férula, and wrapped him on the wrist whenever he made a mistake.

They will meet only twice more. Something will pass between them and after Witold’s death he will leave her a collection of poems in Polish which she must decide if she will have translated. Language is a theme throughout. It is even echoed in Coetzee’s decision to have this book published first in Spanish before English. While giving away something of what passes, these lines are beautifully expressed:

There are other features, however, which irritate her: his stiffness, his remoteness from the world around him, above all the pompous way he talks. Everything he says, everything he does has a formal feel to it. Even in her arms he does not seem able to relax. A comical spectacle, the two of them, making love in English, a tongue whose erotic reaches are closed to them.

In the end Biatriz has to travel to Poland in order to retrieve the poems which were about her. One of the great strengths of the story is her reaction to them:

With the whole of his pathetic project laid out before her on her desk, his project of resurrecting and perfecting a love that was never firmly founded, she is overcome with exasperation but also with pity. The picture grows clearer and clearer before her eyes: the old man at his typewriter in his ugly apartment, trying to force into life his dream of love, using an art that he was not the master of.
I should never have encouraged him, she thinks. I should have nipped the whole thing in the bud. But I did not see where it was leading. I did not see it was going to end up like this.

Elizabeth is back. Coetzee’s 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello created a character that he obviously holds dear and hasn’t finished with. She is an outspoken Australian writer. She appears here in four of the short stories, arguing with her grown-up children and worrying that she is losing her mind. Her daughter runs an art gallery in Nice and for all practical purposes is French, while her son has an American wife and counts as American. She is unsettled to hear herself uttering phrases that only old people say and which she swore never to repeat. ‘People stroll down the street eating pizza and talking into a telephone – what is the world coming to!’
Sitting on a balcony one night she offers her two children a story from her latest collection. A moral tale with a twist of sex which makes her middle-aged children uncomfortable. Are the things that she finds impossible to put into words, just something her children accept as normal?

‘Once upon a time, but in our times, not olden times, there was a man who travelled to a strange city, call it the city of X, for a job interview. From his hotel room, feeling restless, feeling in the mood for adventure, feeling who knows what, he telephoned for a call girl. A girl arrived and spent time with him. He was free with her, more free than he was with his wife; he made certain demands on her.
The interview next day went well. He was offered the job and accepted, and in due course, in the story moved to the city of X, wife and all. Among the people in his new office, working as a secretary or a clerk or a telephonist, he at once recognised the same girl who had come to his room. He recognized her and she recognized him.’
…
‘Go on. What happens next?’
‘It depends…’
Now John speaks. ‘It depends on what passed between them in the hotel. Depends on the demands you say he made on her. In the story, Mother, do you spell out what demands he made?’
‘Yes, I do.’
Now they are silent, all of them. What the man in the city of X will do next, or the girl with the sideline in prostitution, recedes into insignificance. The real story is out there on the balcony, where two middle-aged children face a mother whose capacity to disturb and dismay them I not yet exhausted.

Although Elizabeth sees the beginning of dementia as the point at which she should ‘Do the business’ and end it all with pills, her son, and myself as the reader, think there is still plenty worth listening to.

[Nurbahar Usta · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 - The Pole and Other Stories, yaşlılık & aşk ve ölüm üzerine bir kitap. İki bölümden oluşuyor denebilir. İlk öykü aslında novella (çünkü 150 sayfa), geri kalan öyküler ise Coetze’nin tanıdığımız bir karakteri olan (bence alter egosu) Elizabet Costello’nun artık yaşamının sonlarından kesitler.

The Pole 70lerinde bir piyanistin 50lerinde bir filantropa ilk görüşte aşık olması üzerine bir hikaye. Epey romantik ve gerçeküstü geliyor böyle özetleyince ama etkilenme, görülme, anlaşılma, hatırlanma ihtiyacı üzerine okuduğum en güzel şeylerden biriydi. Düzeni kurulmuş evliliklerde aşkın başka bir forma dönmesi ve artık başka bir aşk ya da heyecan için vazgeçilmeyecek kadar değerli ya da sahiplenilmiş olması üzerine de akıp giden çok güzel bir çizgisi var. Aşkın, heyecanlı ve mutlu anlardan öteye geçmiş ama zaman zaman da sıkıcılaşmış o boşluklarını harika yansıtmış.

Okuduğum Coetze kitaplarını ve yorumlarımı kontrol ederken, geçen yılın son dakikalarında da Coetze okuduğumu şaşkınlıkla fark ettim. Romancının Romanı olarak çevrilen Elizabeth Costello’yu çok çok sevmiştim; tanımaya doyamamıştım, gençliğini, parlaklığını, yükselişini ve sonra yavaş yavaş zamanı kaçırmasını, konu dışı kalmasını, çocuklarıyla sürekli evrilen ilişkilerini okumak çok çok güzeldi. Belli ki Coetze de kopamamış hanımefendiden. Sanırım ona dair okuyacağımız pek bir şey kalmadı artık burdaki öykülerle birlikte. Coetze’nin de 80 üzeri yaşında olması da Costello’nun öyküsüyle örtüşüyor sanırım yine.

Sadece Coetze ile ilgili henüz anlayamadığım bir animal cruelty sorunu var ortada. Daha üç kitabını okudum sadece, ama hepsinde bir şekilde konu dönüp dolaşıp hayvanlara geliyor, hayvanlar çok da pleasant olmayan şekillerde kurguya dahil oluyorlar. Bunla ilgili çalışmış birileri kesin vardır, ilerleyen günlerde küçük bir google scholar turuna çıkıcam “Coetze & animals” diye.

Bir diğer tesadüf ise, kitabı alırken (sırf çevirisi henüz olmayan Coetze kitabı diye almıştım) hem The Pole’un büyük kısmının hem Costello’nun bazı yıllarının İspanya’da geçtiğini bilmiyordum. İspanyolca bilmeyen bu kişilerin ilk kaptığı kelimeleri, cümleleri görmek de inanılmaz tatlı oldu benim için.

[Text Publishing]

The following book reviews have been shared by Text Publishing – publisher of The Pole and Other Stories

‘‘The Pole’, the extended title story, is a fine, reflective literary work that will intrigue, abrase and tease…This story is written with an elegance of expression that acts as a deliberate veneer to cover (or expose) the emotion, messiness and unpredictability of life. It epitomises ‘the art of fiction’.’
Books+Publishing

‘Coetzee’s gaze, in a manner that only Tolstoy and a few other writers might realise, is unblinkingly directed here towards last things. The Pole takes the author’s perennial concerns (particularly those dealing with our treatment of animals) and reworks them in minimalist form…Coetzee proves himself a true and loving creator.’
Australian Book Review

‘Accomplished, elegiac and quietly moving…Beneath plain spoken surfaces unexpected depths are often revealed, melancholy and glinting with flashes of sweetness, humour, and grand, existential strangeness.’
Declan Fry, Guardian

‘[The Pole] has a ravishing originality, an intense surge of full-blooded feeling that makes the reader gasp at the mastery of literary form and the reconfiguration of its every jot and tittle. This is major fiction and it deserves the attention of anyone with a belief in the way the tesserae of storytelling can recreate a world both intimately familiar and the invocation of emotions and their enactment, which are sweepingly strange…A masterpiece…A thing of wonder, inscrutable, heart-stopping and profound.’
Peter Craven, Weekend Australian

‘It may only serve as a coda to his late masterwork [the Jesus trilogy], but The Pole still radiates with Coetzee’s characteristic wit, clarity and humane insight.’
Bram Presser

‘The latest novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace concerns a Polish pianist who falls in love (or in lust) with a married woman. Not interested at first, she soon finds herself drawn into her pursuer’s orbit—which is not to say he has won. Coetzee is a master of shifting power dynamics and complex relationships; this slim book should be a treat.’
LitHub

‘Coetzee is perhaps the greatest living philosopher working in the novel form…No other writer can put together sentences at once so apparently simple and so minutely attentive to the near-invisible gradations of meaning etched into every word…Every addition to such an oeuvre is a precious gift to be treasured.’
Age

‘The Pole and Other Stories is a timely reminder of Coetzee’s extraordinary literary legacy, which is so much more profound than this modest understatement would suggest. There has been an enormous amount of scholarship on his work and these stories provide a taste of why this is so…The publication of this collection is a welcome and significant tribute to this brilliant writer and, for readers new to his work, provide a gateway to one of the most important writers of our time.’
Conversation

‘Beautifully created…[Coetzee is] one of the most eminent writers still living and still producing stuff today.’
RNZ Nine to Noon

‘Astonishing…Literature, especially great literature—and Coetzee’s surely is—tends to abet, to mitigate life’s little mistakes and failings…In The Pole and Other Stories, Coetzee revisits his perennial themes: animal kinship, ontological questions and the nature of desire…Beneath plain-spoken surfaces unexpected depths are often revealed, glinting with flashes of playful seriousness, humour, and grand, existential strangeness—a sense of how the past occupies us until, one day, we come to occupy it.’
Guardian

‘Unconventional and extraordinary…The Pole and Other Stories has all of [Coetzee’s] trademarks: the elegant, profound prose, the bone-dry humour, the desire to ask questions without expecting—or delivering—an answer…Great writers open doors. This book opened a few for this reader, including one to Chopin. It opened more personal ones, too, as I suspect it will do for reader after reader.’
Stephen Romei, Saturday Paper

‘Coetzee’s writing manages to be both entertaining and a catalyst for philosophical introspection.’
Good Reading (4.5 stars)

‘The Pole…sounds the depths of its characters’ extraordinary inner lives contained within their familiar shells…With keen insight, deft and purposeful formal play, and simple but rhythmic prose, The Pole achieves a quiet, meditative mood—reminiscent of fine music—within which a rare kind of deep listening, and perhaps even human understanding, can occur.’
Shelf Awareness (starred review)

‘What I loved about the whole collection is that it joins a quite robust literature of senescence, of writing at the end of life…This book is so wonderfully wry and aloof and has a kind of sensibility to it that sets it apart…It feels like you’re watching an elder statesman of literature, very assured of what he can do, watching the things we do as human beings, with a bit of a wink.’
Beejay Silcox, ABC RN Bookshelf

‘The Pole and Other Stories paints a dynamic philosophical portrait that has something for everyone. The book promises to “make you think differently about life, death and animals” and it could not have delivered any better on this premise…Longtime Coetzee readers will find this collection immensely satisfying, while remaining an accessible jumping-off point for those unfamiliar with his work.’
Otago Daily Times

‘Coetzee the purist has always written close to degree zero; the prose in The Pole is glacial, though we sense swift torrents flowing deep under the ice…There will be no striving after-effects, and nothing of the merely picturesque…The strongest piece is ‘The Glass Abattoir’, in which Elizabeth Costello returns to a proposition she previously put forward, “that people tolerate the slaughter of animals only because they get to see none of it”.’
John Banville, Guardian

‘[W]e never get anything like a direct account of Witold’s interiority, and in any case the Polish pianist is not The Pole’s main character. That is Beatriz, a businessman’s wife...How predictable this two-hander all seems! Even to Beatriz, and yet her creator could not write predictably if he tried. J.M. Coetzee has divided this spare and slippery novel into six chapters, each defining a different stage in his characters’ relationship…Witold is a pole of another kind, and in his way magnetic. Positive or negative, it doesn’t matter: he moves the needle of Beatriz’s life; he pulls her off course, a lodestone who changes her direction simply by calling out to her.’
New York Review of Books

‘Older writers and philosophers bring us great and surprising gifts.’
Townsville Bulletin

Australian Book of the Year, 2023.
‘[The Pole] is a sublime work of fiction. It’s literature, but also philosophy. The other stories in the collection are glorious, too.’
Caroline Overington, Australian

[Michael Joe Armijo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a gift from a dear friend (Suzi DIGBY) and one thing I got from it was to listen to Chopin music while reading. It is a beautiful thing to do and I highly recommend it.

The main story, THE POLE, follows the story of a married woman being courted by an elder musician/composer. The remaining stories follow a mother at age 72, dealing with her latter years that include thought provoking conversations with her grown up son & daughter. There were also defensive tales about cruelty to animals and it made me more sensitive to all living things (including animals).

Here are the lines that captured me along the way:

THE POLE

Hands betray one’s age, as does one’s throat, as do the folds of one’s armpit.

‘If Chopin had lived longer he would have returned to Poland. He was a young man when he departed, he was a young man when he died. Young men are not happy at home. They search adventure.’

‘Chopin is important because he tells us about ourselves. About our desires. Which are sometimes not clear to us. Which are sometimes desires for that which we cannot have. That which is beyond us. Let the music speak, then you will understand.’

Your path crossed mine by the purest of chance.

‘Normal is a good word.’
‘Maybe ordinary is better. I wish to live with you. That is the wish of my heart. I wish to live with you until I die. In an ordinary way, side by side. But if not, okay, I accept. For just a day even. For just a minute. Time is nothing. We have our memory. I will hold you in my memory. And you, maybe you will remember me too.’

‘Poland is not beautiful. Poland is full of rubbish. Centuries of rubbish. We do not bury it. We do not hide it. To love Poland you must be born there. You will not love my country, if you come.’

‘Not everyone enters history. There are people who spend their whole lives trying to be part of history and fail. I don’t try. I am content to be who I am.’

‘Some of us remember good memories. Some of us remember bad memories. We choose which memories we remember.’

Always he sees the best in her.

In a good marriage the partners respect each other’s right to have secrets.

He found the perfect rose between the legs of a certain woman, and thus attained final peace.

The love you felt for me led you to love of the good.

He should have written: The love I felt for you led me to love of the good.

He wrote to tell her that he went on loving her long after their time together in _________.

He was facing death and trying to convince himself it was not the end of everything.

She was hoping for more. It is hard to admit to, but she was hoping that the man who loved her would have used that love, that energy, that eros, to bring her to life better than he has managed to do.

During all the time I knew you, I confess, I never once thought of you as a little boy. I treated you as a rational grown-up and expected you to treat me in the same way. That may have been another mistake. If we had dropped the adult masks and approached each other as a child to child we might have done better. But of course, becoming a child is not as easy as it looks.

My feelings were more shaded, more complex.

AS A WOMAN GROWS OLDER

In this life we do not always get what we deserve.

Where would the art of fiction be if there were no double meanings?

What would life itself be if there were only heads or tails, with nothing in between?

I have become trapped in a cliche. The cliche of the stuck record, which lost its meaning when gramophones and gramophone needles disappeared.

‘You teach people how to feel. By dint of grace. The grace of the pen as it follows the movements of thought.’

‘Gloomy states of mind do not yield interesting thoughts.’

THE GLASS ABATTOIR

‘It started seriously, then it changed. That is the trouble with most of the stuff I write nowadays. It starts as one thing and ends as another.’

HOPE

‘They say that playing an instrument is good for dementia. Or playing chess.’

There is always hope. But hope is like grace. If you bank on it, it will not come. Otherwise life would be too easy.

THE DOG

She had read Augustine. Augustine says that the clearest evidence that we are fallen creatures lies in the fact that we cannot control the movements of our own bodies.

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid, competent, not the best work I’ve seen from Coetzee, though I was immensely moved by his story against factory farming here, “The Glass Abattoir”

[Nandana Sony]

masterful

[soph · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the philosophical nature of Coetzee's writing, I would definitely like to read more of his work. I am intrigued by the collection of stories after The Pole, which highlight what seems to potentially be a self-insert character, the writer Elizabeth Costello. I need to discuss this with someone who knows more about it than me!

[Geir Ertzgaard · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Jeg har så langt i livet ikke klart å forstå hvorfor aldrende forfattere på død og liv ser seg nødt til å skrive romaner om aldrende kunstnere", skriver Even Teistung, ung anmelder i Bokmagasinet, Klassekampen når han skriver denne boken. Ikke rart du ikke forstår, Even. Du er for ung!

Godt mulig du må være litt oppi åra for å forstå denne boken, det er litt annerledes å se hverden fra etter 60-streken enn før, og noe av det som gjør at Polakken er ble en fenomenal avslutning på 2024-lesesesongen, var nettopp dette at jeg på tross av ulikheter i erfaringer, kjenner meg så til de grader igjen i tematikken: Du ser livet annerledes når du ser det i gråsonen.

Og J. M. Coetzee skriver fremdeles like skingrende bra og enkelt som han gjorde i den enda mer fabelaktige boken "Disgrace" som handler om å se tilbake på livet mens du enda er litt yngre, og det må bare anbefales. Les den, men husk at eldre forfattere også har et syn på livet.

[Keen Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars!

“Kill yourself at twenty and it is a tragic loss. Kill yourself at forty and it is a sobering comment on the times. But kill yourself at seventy and people say, “What a shame, she must have had cancer.” ”

The dark spectre of impending mortality looms heavily over much of these tales. Personally I find Coetzee to be one of the most over rated authors out there. His work is very hit and miss and yet the critics adore him and yet I keep returning to it?...

I think it’s because so often I find his prose too cold and stilted and sometimes claustrophobic. These are stories filled with cold, snobby bitches and weak, one-dimensional men and difficult and depressed septuagenarians. And yet it’s actually a fairly enjoyable collection with its dark and quirky characters. You couldn’t love anything in here, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading.

[Lukasz Pruski · Rating 4 out of 5]

The eponymous novella is a beautiful love story about two people, whose joint age far exceeds 100 years. J.M. Coetzee, who was 82 when the collection was published, is in top form in "The Pole," but the novella will most likely resonate with readers born close to the middle of the previous century. In my view, the remaining five stories in the collection do not match the excellence of "The Pole."

[Kamil Kostogrys · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intensely intimate. Coetzee teems with life.

[Ana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Coetzee's writing style isn't for me but I really enjoyed 'The Pole'. The other stories fell short. 'The Pole' left me feeling pretty depressed about how an older women can still encounter dynamics I've been exposed to since I was a teen. Beautiful. Tragic. Brilliant. It was the highlight of the collection. The others I could have easily skipped and not missed. (Lose a star for the quality of the remaining short stories.)

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three and half, really. The title piece is the best, and seems like return to the days of Disgrace, which for most, is the same thing as a return to form.

The other stories: not so much. They are more like dialogues and essays than fiction. That they bring back by far Coetzee’s least-interesting character (Elizabeth Costello) is perhaps an early warning.

However, it should be said - nay, proclaimed - this is Coetzee’s funniest book since the underrated Youth. I’d like to see more dry wit in his future books.

[Ed Stoddard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This brisk anthology explores emotive terrain such as obsession, mother-son relations, and animal rights in Coetzee's concise and stylish manner. The title story, a novella, sets the scene, and the stories become increasingly shorter until the final tale, "The Dog." Set in Europe, the stories are far from Coetzee's native and literary homeland of South Africa. This hardly makes him a fish out of water.

[Febe · Rating 4 out of 5]

JM Coetzee I love you

[Rosie Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best.

[Rick Bennett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very enjoyable short stories. Coetzee is as always a pleasure to read, evoking a series of snapshots into lives that you feel intimately included in. The stories didn’t really resolve themselves in the traditional sense: no happy or satisfying ending, not necessarily always a “moral” to understand, but nonetheless fascinating and compelling and moving.

[Saru · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the readings I enjoyed the most this year. Most of the stories have been already published (and translated). I would have chosen another title for the collection as, except one of the stories, all of them deal with senectitude. In every story, Coetzee deals with different topics philosophically, making you consider your thinking about it.
My favourite is "The glass abattoir", being vegetarian as Coetzee, I found it disturbing as well as marvellous, they way he described the meat industry made me cry and angry, and the subtle way he defended animal rights was necessary. A nobel's prize defending animals' rights in a way that can make people consider the role they play in that industry.

[Matija · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main story takes more than half of the book but it heavily disappoints. Despite the aging and legacy being a revolving theme about the whole book - reference to his age and, in one of the stories to his alter ego as well; The Pole did really poor job. Analyzing the book one may find topics on ability of text to replicate our thoughts, the subjectiveness of art, upper class whereabouts and much more, but combined awfully through characters that move in a completely unnatural way crossing their paths through sheer will of the author. The stories mostly were a breath of fresh air with their non-cumbersome treatment of aging through witty narrative my favorite being ‘The Glass Abattoir’.

[Yvonne · Rating 2 out of 5]

3,5
Quite interesting how I didn't get bored even though there's not much happening. However I couldn't warm up to neither character and couldn't understand Beatriz's behaviour

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars for the titular novella, not for the short stories.

It is ages since I read anything new by J M Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2003, and yet I have four books on the TBR: The Master of Petersburg (1994); Diary of a Bad Year (2007); Summertime (2009), and The Childhood of Jesus (2013).  I bought them all between 2009 and 2013 because I thought Disgrace (1999); Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Slow Man (2005) were brilliant, but my interest faded with The Lives of Animals (1999); and Elizabeth Costello (2001). Only two of all these are reviewed here: Life and Times of Michael K (1983) published in my 'Reviews from the Archive' series, and Foe (1986) which I re-read for Novellas in November in 2021 and realised how much I'd missed when I read it the first time.

Which is why I feel confident that I've missed some aspects of 'The Pole' which is the titular novella of this new book. After all in the very next story 'As a Woman Grows Older',  Elizabeth Costello muses on how she has made a living out of ambivalence, and she asks herself: Where would the art of fiction be if there were no double meanings? 

Narrated by a rather wry observer interpreting only the woman's perspective, The Pole is a tale of unrequited love, first his for her, and then hers for him, half-hearted though it be.  The Pole and the woman he desires are poles apart at the beginning, and in a way that I should have predicted but didn't, also at the end.

Helpfully, Coetzee's Pole, the pianist Witold Walczykiewicz makes the allusion to Beatrice from Dante's Divine Comedy explicit but his Spanish Beatriz will have none of it.  While he has, inexplicably, developed a huge crush on her, she is not the least little bit interested.  The wife of a banker with the sort of social responsibilities that banker's wives have, Beatriz had been roped into escorting Witold around Barcelona when he came to the city on tour.  She had tried not to be predictable, and had found it easy not to gush or flirt, (which is what is expected of middle-aged rich ladies doing cultural duties with artistes.) She had not been 'transported' by his music...

So she had been quite startled by his attempt at renewed contact afterwards because his courtly behaviour had not given even a hint that he was keen. ('Courtly' because he's channelling Dante falling in love with Beatrice, but equally, just distant in his manner, and not just because they are using his not-great English as a lingua franca because she doesn't speak Polish and he doesn't speak Spanish or French.)

Indeed, Witold withholds (ha!) his feelings and has an austere persona. Beatriz's first impressions do not bode well for any passion.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/01/14/t...

[Declan Fry]

Eileen Chang made it to 74. Woolf, 59. Oodgeroo Noonuccal, 72. Wisława Szymborska, 88. Naguib Mahfouz managed 94 (a good innings). Baldwin, 68. Patrick White, 78. Soseki, 49. Cao Xueqin was about 40 or 50; the records vary. Beckett reached 83 – JM Coetzee’s current age. And Imre Kertész, brilliant, embattled – by Parkinson’s, by depression – lived to see 86.

To conceive of death’s apparition – of a death haunting – is to participate in it: sometimes vicariously, sometimes directly. Coetzee, we must assume – no more nor less than any of us – does not know how, or when, the end may arrive. But if The Pole and Other Stories were his final work, it would be astonishing – and no less so for comprising an 18-year span, the latest addition to a career that now extends over nearly half a century.

The earliest of these stories appeared in 2004; the latest arrived last year, not in English but in Spanish, as El Polaco. Indeed, four of the six stories collected here were written in English by Coetzee, but published first in Italian or Spanish. Coetzee has long championed languages outside the global anglosphere; regrettably his Italian translator Maria Baiocchi and Spanish translators Mariana Dimópulos and Elena Marengo are not named as translators in the collection’s acknowledgments, although the publications where the stories appeared are. (The publication of Wen Min’s Chinese translation of The Old Woman and the Cats in 2017 precedes its appearance in Spanish but is also unacknowledged.) This is unfortunate, considering the gendered labour involved, the double meaning and resonance of the collection’s title in English – with its echo of metropole and periphery – but especially as Coetzee has acknowledged that Dimópulos, who translated The Pole into Spanish, helped inform the character of Beatriz, the story’s delightfully bracing female lead.

It has been suggested Coetzee’s writing, which has often first appeared in languages other than English, can feel “like translations into Spanish of an English representing Spanish”. The idea of originals that feel like translations and translations that feel like originals is a ticklish one, perhaps not least for Coetzee, who once translated into English a Dutch translation of Cees Nooteboom’s Dutch translation of an English translation of a Danish story written by Søren Kierkegaard for McSweeney’s.

The collection’s elegiac, eponymous opening novella is a tale of translingual seduction, concerning Witold, a 72-year-old Polish pianist and noted but retiring Chopin interpreter (note, too, the glancing reference to musical translation) and his relationship with Beatriz, a married Catalan woman assisting him during his stay in Barcelona. It opens enigmatically: “The woman is the first to give him trouble, followed soon afterwards by the man.” Who is “him”? Is it Coetzee, shirtsleeves tugged at by his two characters lobbying for life, for the animation fiction grants?

Read on:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...

[Dominic H · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the face of it, one might have imagined that Coetzee's publishers thought that 'The Pole' might be too slight as the sole offering and so looked around for other material to pad out the volume to a respectable length. I'm pleased to say that reading proves my cynical self wrong. This is an important addition to Coetzee's body of work for a number of reasons and actually (and appropriately given the subject matter of 'The Pole') the overall impression is of having attended an especially well planned recital where the pieces within illuminate each other. I might add a better recital than the one offered by the titular 'Pole' in the book where the combination of Haydn, Lutoslawski and the complete Chopin Preludes sounds somewhat indigestible.

'The Pole' itself is an interestingly structured (each chapter contains numbered paragraphs which move the story on a gradient but also creates an effective testamentary backdrop) story about an episode in the life of Beatriz., who after a recital 'becomes' the muse of Witold (the eponymous Pole). It is typical Coetzee in that from fairly minimal narrative ingredients a very honest moral fable is constructed. Overall we are offered a model of thoughtfulness and generosity in Beatriz and a lesson in showing that what is there in a relationship however apparently deficient can still be a cause for optimism, a reason for living. I found it touching - its deliberately fragmentary nature adding to the wistfulness that is ever present in a lot of late Coetzee.

The rest of the book contains four short episodes featuring Coetzee's key character Elizabeth Costello and a final apparently unconnected story, which I will come to. The Elizabeth Costello material in a way bridges a gap between some of the episodes in the novel of that name - which ends with Elizabeth in a truly Kafkaesque version of the afterlife. The earliest of the stories dates from 2003 and the creative time span then runs for approximately another ten years, all after the publication of the novel (so we don't seem to be dealing with unused fragments from the book). In broad terms they show Elizabeth's slow decline whilst stressing again her stubbornness, individuality and intellect. The final story in the book, 'The Dog', apparently unconnected, appears to offer a sort of dream of Elizabeth's where a refraction of her is concerned with her asserting her rights over that of the dog of the title, whereas animal rights themselves are a major concern of Elizabeth's (in the novel and the stories in this book) and of course Coetzee himself. It's extremely clever.

[Luc De Coster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ik heb te weinig van Coetzee gelezen om hem echt te kunnen typeren, maar hij slaagt er wel telkens in om mij vlotjes in zijn door tekst geschapen wereld mee te nemen. Zo moet ik nu toegeven dat het effect dat het verliefd worden van een meer dan zeventigjarige Poolse pianist heeft op een vijftigjarige vrouw die in de schaduw van haar zakenman vrijwilligerswerk doet, zoals het organiseren van klassieke concerten, mij echt geboeid heeft.

Een mens zou geneigd zijn om te zeggen: “Komaan, wat een gekkigheid op die leeftijd”, maar niet alle mensen zijn zoals ik natuurlijk. Toevallig heet ze dan nog eens Beatriz, zodat de Danteske Chopinpianist niet veel nodig heeft om vol vervoering verder door het leven te gaan. Lees het, om de trage en subtiele innerlijke verschuiving bij Beatriz van ietwat cynische nuchterheid naar de overgave aan poëtische zeggingskracht en de hang naar een (abstracte) liefde te ervaren.

Coetzee is speels en ernstig tegelijk. Dat komt wel meer voor. Komedie en tragedie. Elke schrijver moet er mee aan de slag en keuzes maken. Ook zij die resoluut voor exclusief het ene of het andere kiezen. Maar dat doet Coetzee hier dus niet. Hoewel hij niet direct als een dijenkletser bekend staat, worden de personages hier toch met een milde ironie gepresenteerd.

“The Pole” is een verhalenbundel, waarvan dit verhaal 150 van de 250 bladzijden in beslag neemt. Een novelle dus, gevolg door nog vijf kortverhalen die ik ook met plezier gelezen heb. Thematisch worden de verhalen samengehouden door de ouder wordende vrouwelijk hoofdpersonages, die een paar keer Elisabeth Costello blijken te zijn, het personage uit een eerdere (gelijknamige) roman van Coetzee.

Goed gedaan.

[Sam Quixote · Rating 2 out of 5]

Old age, eh? That’s kinda the theme for this collection of short stories by Sarth Ifrikan writer JM Coetzee.

The Pole is the longest story here, taking up nearly two-thirds of the book. An elderly Polish pianist falls for a slightly younger Spanish woman and woos her, old folks-style. It’s a realistic romance story where Coetzee doesn’t go for overblown melodrama, but the story is still quite predictable. And boring.

Around twenty years ago, Coetzee wrote a novel about an aging Australian novelist called Elizabeth Costello, and two of the stories here feature the same character - still old, still a novelist, still adamantly Aussie. I won’t go through the stories individually here but they all focus on elderly characters and their relationships with their adult children, and still retaining their agency despite their age.

Coetzee’s prose is fine - smooth, clear, easy to read, even enjoyable at times - but the stories just didn’t do anything for me. Maybe because I’m (luckily) decades away from the life stages the characters (and Coetzee) are in, but there wasn’t much in any of the stories that really grabbed my attention.

Or maybe Coetzee’s medium simply isn’t short stories? I’ve read and enjoyed two of his novels - Disgrace and Foe - which is odd for me as he’s a multi-award-winning writer and I usually don’t jibe with those. And he wouldn’t be the first novelist whose short stories didn’t measure up to his longer works; there are writers who are opposite in that regard too.

Either way, there’s nowt much special about The Pole and Other Stories and you’re not missing much by giving it a miss. But I do think his novels are quite something - definitely a writer worth looking into where his longer works are concerned.

[Max “Big Lad” McLoughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Coetzee writes with such an elegant clarity, such a sparse precision. It is refreshing to read a writer who seems to have calculated the effect of every word he uses; one who has mastered the sentence.

This collection consists of a novella, The Pole, and three short stories. The titular story first appeared in Spanish to ‘resist the hegemony of the English language’. And Coetzee said of the translation that it better served his intentions. Strange. The story follows the relationship between Witold, an ageing polish pianist — a notable, yet staid interpreter of Chopin — and Beatrice, a Catalan socialite who facilitates Witold’s trip to Barcelona. Through the course of the novella, the enigma of desire and the inscrutability of the other are exacerbated by the paucity of language and the inadequacies of translation. On an intellectual level, the story leaves much to ponder. But more concretely, I just enjoyed inhabiting Beatrice’s consciousness for a while — her blend of curiosity and disdain for the romantic myths struck a chord.

The other stories were interesting but sat awkwardly alongside the novella. As a whole, the collection was a bit chimeric. The leftover stories felt cobbled together without much thought just to make up the rest of the book. (God forbid a book is published under two hundred pages!). They mostly concerned Coetzee’s literary alter ego, Elisabeth Costello, as we follow her usual disquisitions about the mistreatment of animals — but also, death. They read more like Socratic dialogues than stories. Though certainly a tonal shift from the novella, they seem to mark something: Coetzee is preparing to die.

[LR 135 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am terrible with referencing. It would be more honest of me to admit that I am afraid of my reference being challenged. Thus to the nameless author who I remember remarking how important it is for a story to be shaped independently without being made solely to be a vehicle for the author's views. This sentiment passed in my mind when I read the 'other stories' in this collection. Most of them being about an erratic writer and her relationship with her children specifically her son. The problem I had with these set of stories was them clearly being a puppet for the writer's thoughts. I do not have a problem with the writer stating their opinion however I do believe there is a point where I would prefer for a piece of fiction to be a personal essay.

Now, to the titular short story. I really enjoyed it. It was an interesting deconstruction of wanting love to be grand and great. Even when the emotions and feelings aren't there. There is so much tragedy yet comedy in the way this whole affair is dealt with. Beatriz is too rich for the affair to be a scandal and the pianist to be entirely inconsequential for the most part. The question of it being a scandal does not come in question. However, the difference is the characters WANT it to be a scandal. They want to feel they are in some great romantic escapade. Unfortunately, that doesn't exist. It truly is a brillaint piece of work because of this unique situation.

[Krista Toovey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Coetzee really is an intriguing, experimental and masterful writer. South African but now lives in Adelaide, he is often now considered an Aussie writer and his novels pop up on lists of the best Australian fiction. That is where I saw this one and found a copy at my local library. I love reading his work because the characters he creates are always multifaceted, often strangely aloof and painfully human.

In the title story, “The Pole” he tells the story of Wittold - an ageing Polish pianist who becomes besotted by Beatriz - a significantly younger wife of a banker from Barcelona who is, at first, completely indifferent to him.

Beatriz is given the dominant perspective and narrative voice and the story is a series of numbered paragraphs detailing their relationship - from meeting to her translation of a series of poems he eventually writes for her. I loved the story, particularly for its illumination of even the most self assured ageing woman’s satisfaction with being desired and affirmed. Beatriz certainly doesn’t need or even desire Wittold’s attention, but she is mildly captivated by it anyway.

The other stories included are equally as interesting - several include Elizabeth from Elizabeth Costello (another novel of his) which was a nice Easter egg for Coetzee fans.

[Hjwoodward · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not find the first 100 pages or so of 'The Pole' engaging. To me, Coetzee has very little warmth in his writer's armoury and so I left it lying about: not reading further for at least a month. But goodness, as soon as the poems entered stage left I was hooked. The lost-in-translation trope is fascinating, possibly partly because I am bilingual myself. (If you read Ingrid Jonker's poems in English, they are kind of flat, while in Afrikaans they sing.) Anyway, the story definitely redeemed itself in the last third. And the stories afterwards promise to be wonderful: I'm busy loving the one where the mother meets up with her children in Nice. LATER: The stories after The Pole certainly fulfilled their promise! Wow. I am blown away by JM Coetzee's brilliance, his work is just head and shoulders above any writing I usually read: NOT because of his warmth and humanity (!) but because of his incisive, analytical mind. He tackles difficult subjects: Heidegger and the tick, the whole way humanity deals with animals, death. He is unflinching, harsh and so, so clever! I am struck dumb by his utter otherness. He faces head-on concerns we should be thinking about: abbotoirs, chickens, sterilisation and bludgeons us with original and uncomfortable thoughts.

[Alistair · Rating 3 out of 5]

Never before reading a Coetzee novel, I initially thought, oh my goodness, this is way above me: international prizes galore, etc. I think I had grounds to doubt.
The title story of this collection is fascinating and engaging, even though I thought the author wanted to keep The Reader distanced. He employs a technique that allows the first person narrative of Beatriz to remain aloof - from the titular Pole, but also from herself. Several times Beatriz describes herself as “uncurious”, but I suspect you may think otherwise. Despite her protestations against demonstrative emotions, she is able to write a paragraph filled with yearning and passion (p. 140). The recipient of love can fashion that emotion into whatever pleases her. And she does.
The later, shorter stories, bring back a character from several of Coetzee’s earlier novels and stories: Elizabeth Costello. She is not a monster of the Patrick White oeuvre, but sufficiently self-absorbed to undermine her adult children in the only way she can: through intellect.
The author’s intent seems important; never does the conversations with her children (if that’s what they’re called), move beyond “he said”, “she said”, no matter what emotional impact this is having.
In one of the stories , ‘The glass abattoir’, this authorial control becomes paramount; the story could almost become an essay rather than fiction.
What I came away from reading was the craftsmanship of Coetzee’s writing style, rather than anything inherent in the stories themselves. Read them and make up your own mind. It’s that sort of book.